Comment by JamesSwift
15 hours ago
To think companies worry about protecting the talent supply chain is to put your fingers in your ears and ignore your eyes for the past 5-10 years. We were already in a crisis of seniority where every single role was “senior only” and AI is only going to increase that.
I actually think the opposite will happen. Suddenly, smart AI-enabled juniors can easily match the productivity of traditional (or conscientious) seniors, so why hire seniors at all?
If you are an exec, you can now fire most of your expensive seniors and replace them with kids, for immediate cash savings. Yeah, the quality of your product might suffer a bit, bugs will increase, but bugs don't show up on the balance sheet and it will be next year's problem anyway, when you'll have already gone to another company after boasting huge savings for 3 quarters in a row.
> Suddenly, smart AI-enabled juniors can easily match the productivity of traditional (or conscientious) seniors, so why hire seniors at all?
I guess we'll see, but so far the flattening curve of LLM capabilities suggest otherwise. They are still very effective with simpler tasks, but they can't crack the hardest problems like a senior developer does.